For many years fully automatic weapons have proved their value in combat forces. Weapons such as automatic rifles, submachine guns, and machine guns increase the fire power of military forces while keeping the number of weapons required to a minimum. This is true for ground forces as well as for weapons used as aircraft armament.
While small arms weapons and aircraft armament systems have enjoyed the rapid fire capabilities of automatic weapons for years, this is not true of artillery weapons. Artillery weapons require manual reloading between each round fired. A factor which affects the firing rate of artillery weapons is the bore size of the weapon which determines the size and type of ammunition used. Generally, the larger the bore size, the heavier and more cumbersome the ammunition. Many times, artillery ammunition requires loading of the projectile and propellent charge separately. This would obviously reduce the firing rate of these weapons. Therefore, the efficiency of the weapon crew determines, to a large extent, the firing rate of the weapon.
Vehicle mounted artillery weapons suffer space limitations which makes efficient execution of the loading and firing sequence much more difficult. Additionally, vehicles such as tanks normally fire high velocity armor piercing ammunition which is much heavier than comparable explosive rounds. For these reasons fully automatic tank cannon weapons are extremely desirable. Obviously, a tank with the capability of firing a round per second has a much greater hit and kill probability than conventional systems which can fire only three or four rounds per minute.
Additionally, a great cost savings could be realized by utilizing fully automatic tank cannon weapons since the same or greater fire power can be obtained from fewer weapons. Considering the extremely high cost of armored systems, the savings could be quite significant.